


META: Snape’s Supposed Great Love

by rexluscus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Lily Evans/Severus Snape - Freeform, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 12:21:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16912803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: An essay about Snape written just afterThe Deathly Hallowswas released.





	META: Snape’s Supposed Great Love

**Author's Note:**

> Before you throw tomatoes, remember I wrote this over ten years ago.

**Mugglenet/Leaky Cauldron 2005**

> MA: Has Snape ever been loved by anyone?
> 
> JKR: Yes, he has, which in some ways makes him more culpable even than Voldemort, who never has.

So, we’re all a little upset because, after six books of compelling ambiguity, it turns out that Snape Did It All For Love. God, how…trite. It couldn’t have been that he realized he was wrong, that he’d done bad things, that he had to atone? It was just some emo shit like omg the girl i like died now everything i do is for her thing? Where is all the complexity, the subtle examination of the nature of remorse, redemption and the relativity of right and wrong that six books of masterful characterization led us to expect?

Actually, I think it’s all right there, hiding in plain sight.

To go forward, we need to understand that when JK Rowling uses the word “love”, she loads it with some very specific baggage. It is not just a psychological state; in fact, I don’t think it ever is. It’s more like a spiritual state. It has magical reality–it effects the way magic works. In the symbology of Harry Potter, it’s represented by the Patronus–the thing that, no matter what, never deceives and can’t be touched by Dark Magic. This is not psychological verisimilitude; for love to be magic, it must be absolute and unambiguous, which we know it never is. This is the love of Tristan and Isolde, not Vronsky and Anna Karenina. Consider Snape: realistically, how could somebody hate the world and love just one person, but with the unambivalent purity of a lover in a fairy tale? It’s just not possible. So we must accept that Snape is a bit of a magical creature, as it were.

Bearing in mind that we are dealing with fairy-tale love, then, what is remarkable is how Snape’s love for Lily changes. When Snape and Lily are children, it is nothing like the ideal that JKR shows us with Harry and his parents. But the nature of what Snape feels for Lily transforms, and he transforms along with it. It always remains “love” in the indestructible fairy-tale sense, but over time and experience, it is gradually refined until it more closely resembles the selfless love of JKR’s moral vision.

In the “Prince’s Tale” chapter, we see that Snape’s love for Lily starts out as “greedy"–selfish, covetous. What attracts him to her are the same things that motivate his entire early life–his desire for power, and his conviction that magic and magic alone makes him special. Those same things are what attract him to Voldemort later on. Love, as it is in this form, brings none of the redemptive qualities JKR has associated with it, because it’s a possessive love. As a consequence, Snape isn’t able to generalize from Lily to the rest of humanity; he just sees her, and everybody else is sorta beside the point.

This is what disgusts Dumbledore when Snape asks him to protect Lily–he doesn’t give a shit about James or Harry. He asks Voldemort to spare her in a similarly self-serving way, but of course it doesn’t work, and she dies. Now, here’s the key part. If you love somebody in a selfish, possessive way and then they die, what happens? You no longer have a chance of possessing them, so where does such a love go? It must either cease to exist, or transform. Let’s see:

> "I thought…you were going…to keep her…safe…”
> 
> “She and James put their faith in the wrong person,” said Dumbledore. “Rather like you, Severus. Weren’t you hoping that Lord Voldemort would spare her?”
> 
> Snape’s breathing was shallow.
> 
> “Her boy survives,” said Dumbledore.
> 
> With a tiny jerk of his head, Snape seemed to flick off an irksome fly.
> 
> “Her son lives. He has her eyes, precisely her eyes. You remember the shape and color of Lily Evans’s eyes, I am sure?”
> 
> “DON’T!” bellowed Snape. “Gone…dead…”

Listen to that carefully. What is Dumbledore trying to do to Snape here? He’s trying to make him feel guilty, definitely, trying to make him see more than just his own pain and realize that what he did was wrong in addition to having taken Lily away. But he’s also suggesting something else–that a part of Lily persists in the world in the form of Harry. Snape’s reaction to this idea is violent. No, no, no, he insists, she’s dead and gone. It’s like he wants that to be true, wants to convince himself of it. Why does he do this?

> “Is this remorse, Severus?”
> 
> “I wish…I wish I were dead…”
> 
> “And what use would that be to anyone?” said Dumbledore coldly. “If you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her, then your way forward is clear.”
> 
> Snape seemed to peer through a haze of pain, and Dumbledore’s words appeared to take a long time to reach him.
> 
> “What–what do you mean?”

What’s happening here is that the little bubble of Snape’s self-centered love is popping. He resists it at first, wants it to be just her and him who are important, but then Dumbledore lays down this challenge: “If you truly loved her…” Now, if he’s going to remain alive, his love for her must transform to allow for the possibility of other people in the equation. Other people who were important to Lily who aren’t him. People he had heretofore seen as his competition, but who he would now have to think of as inextricably linked to her.

Obviously he has trouble with this concept. He hates Harry because he hates the part of Harry that isn’t Lily (and especially the part of Harry that is James). He still loves selfishly. But he at least gets the idea that Harry was important to Lily, that a bit of Lily lives on in him, and therefore he, Snape, should protect him as a way of holding onto her. He redirects his feelings for Lily from the physical-in-the-world woman herself onto Harry, who now stands in for her. This doesn’t mean he feels anything for Harry; he just values Harry as a stand-in. But he does value Harry, and that’s a step in the right direction.

In the next few vignettes in “The Prince’s Tale,” we see Snape at various stages down the way as the second war with Voldemort begins and Snape continues to execute his commission of protecting Harry. But the things we see have little to do with Harry. Snape is acquiring what is at least the appearance of virtue–bravery, loyalty, dedication to the cause. Presumably, he’s still doing all of this to protect Harry in Lily’s name, but if that’s the case, he’s getting pretty sidetracked. Let’s just say, though, that he really does do each of these things for Lily. In that case, his feelings for her are leading him blindly through the motions of virtuous choices. Dumbledore always says it’s our choices that define us–that when it comes down to it, no matter what’s inside of us, what we choose to do is what we should be judged by. That’s all very well and good, but what if we make the right choices for the wrong reasons?

What does that make us? That’s the liminal position Snape is in.

Let’s cut now to much earlier in the book, to the scene in which Harry follows the doe: 

> Harry stared at the creature, filled with wonder, not at her strangeness, but at her inexplicable familiarity. He felt that he had been waiting for her to come, but that he had forgotten, until this moment, that they had arranged to meet. His impulse to shout for Hermione, which had been so strong a moment ago, had gone. He knew, he would have staked his life on it, that she had come for him, and him alone.
> 
> They gazed at each other for several long moments and then she turned and walked away.
> 
> “No,” he said, and his voice was cracked with lack of use. “Come back!”
> 
> She continued to step deliberately through the trees, and soon her brightness was striped by their thick black trunks. For one trembling second he hesitated. Caution murmured it could be a trick, a lure, a trap. But instinct, overwhelming instinct, told him that this was not Dark Magic. He set off in pursuit.
> 
> Snow crunched beneath his feet, but the doe made no noise as she passed through the trees, for she was nothing but light. Deeper and deeper into the forest she led him, and Harry walked quickly, sure that when she stopped, she would allow him to approach her properly. And then she would speak and the voice would tell him what he needed to know.
> 
> At last, she came to a halt. She turned her beautiful head toward him once more, and he broke into a run, a question burning in him, but as he opened his lips to ask it, she vanished.
> 
> Though the darkness had swallowed her whole, her burnished image was still imprinted on his retinas; it obscured his vision, brightening when he lowered his eyelids, disorienting him. Now fear came: Her presence had meant safety.
> 
> “Lumos!” he whispered, and the wand-tip ignited.
> 
> The imprint of the doe faded away with every blink of his eyes as he stood there, listening to the sounds of the forest…

Does this sound familiar? It should, because it perfectly describes Snape’s own blind stumbling toward virtue. He sees the doe and wants her–wants to talk to her, make contact with her–but she turns and walks away, so, without meaning to, he follows her somewhere. The whole way he’s going, he’s focused on the goal of speaking to her–he’s not thinking at all about where they’re going. Then she disappears, and he’s far away from his original position, in the dark, alone.

Then–this bit’s important–her afterimage blinds him, and he has to produce his own light to figure out what the hell to do next. Once he does that, he eventually stumbles across the thing she was leading him toward–his real goal, although he hadn’t realized it as he was following her. That is what love is for Snape at this stage–the vision he yearns for and follows so that it leads him, without his awareness, to something else.

The moment he realizes he has followed one thing and been led to another is this passage:

> “So the boy…the boy must die?” asked Snape quite calmly.
> 
> “And Voldemort himself must do it, Severus. That is essential.”
> 
> Another long silence. Then Snape said, “I thought…all these years…that we were protecting him for her. For Lily.”
> 
> “We have protected him because it has been essential to teach him, to raise him, to let him try his strength,” said Dumbledore, his eyes still tight shut. “Meanwhile, the connection between them grows stronger, a parasitic growth: Sometimes I have thought he suspects it himself. If I know him, he will have arranged matters so that when he does set out to meet his death, it will truly mean the end of Voldemort.”
> 
> Dumbledore opened his eyes. Snape looked horrified.
> 
> “You have kept him alive so that he can die at the right moment?”
> 
> “Don’t be shocked, Severus. How many men and women have you watched die?”
> 
> “Lately, only those whom I could not save,” said Snape. He stood up. “You have used me.”
> 
> “Meaning?”
> 
> “I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter–”
> 
> “But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”
> 
> “For him?” shouted Snape. “ _Expecto Patronum!_ ”
> 
> From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe: She landed on the office floor, bounded once across the office, and soared out of the window. Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
> 
> “After all this time?”
> 
> “Always,” said Snape.

Now, a lot of people interpret this passage as meaning that Snape hasn’t changed at all–he hasn’t become a better person, he hasn’t learned to do the right thing for its own sake, he’s still just acting out of his self-centered fixation on Lily. Well, yes and no. Yes, because that’s what he thought he was doing. No, because in this scene, we are witnessing a change, just like the one that occurred in Dumbledore’s office the night Lily died. Snape’s feelings for Lily must now undergo a second transformation because their object has been taken away again. When Lily first died, Snape took his feelings for her and pointed them somewhere else. At Harry, but not really–more at the idea of Harry, Harry as a piece of Lily that still remained in the world. Now that, too, is taken away from him. He’s in the woods, the doe he was following is gone, and he’s in the dark.

The scenes following this one in the pensieve memories are things that happened in the present book. Everything we see Snape do now–none of it can be motivated by the obligation to protect Harry, because he knows Harry is going to die. He is no longer doing what Dumbledore says because he thinks he is preserving this little scrap of Lily in the world, no longer doing good deeds for her and not their own sake. He can only be acting of his own free will.

The first thing he did, under this new freedom, was kill Dumbledore. Arguably, that wasn’t a free act at all because of the Unbreakable Vow, but in order to be compelled by the Vow, he would have to fear death, and we know he doesn’t. He could have died, if he chose to–but dying, as Dumbledore tells him, is too easy. He did this because he wanted to, granting Dumbledore’s request, not under duress, but because he thought it was what ought to be done.

When Snape was a kid, anything that wasn’t Lily was worthless. After Lily died, anything that wasn’t associated with her was worthless, including the majority of Harry. But after years of making the right choices for the wrong reasons, he’s inadvertently been led to the right reasons. Each diversion from his path has forced him to expand his experience of love a little bit more. First it includes only its object; later it includes Harry by association. When it transforms a third time, it is finally able to include Harry as himself. I don’t mean that he now loves Harry. I mean he’s able to put his feelings for Lily to the same use that Harry does–as a guide for choosing what is right and wrong. But, this is important, he is choosing now, instead of being led blindly. That’s JKR’s understanding of love: if it’s real and unselfish, then it forms our ability to empathize and thus our capacity for moral choice.

Harry, you’ll notice, is rarely altruistic; most of what he does that is good, he does out of love for specific individuals, living or dead. His love for these individuals, however, allows him to generalize–to see his loved ones in every human face, as it were. That isn’t the same thing as mentally substituting the beloved face for the stranger’s, which is what Snape does. But in Dumbledore’s office when Snape says “Always” and produces the Patronus, he begins to shift toward love as it is for Harry–Lily ceases being an object or a goal and becomes a constitutive part of him. That is what a Patronus is–the part of oneself formed out of the people one loves. Snape’s “Always” echoes the idea running through the books that the people we love never leave us; in becoming a part of us, they become immortal.

There are some fundamental differences between the way Snape and Harry rely on the people they love to guide them. To begin with, Harry’s loved ones love him back. Snape fucked up and alienated his, so now he can only hang on to the memory of when she did love him. He probably hates James and Harry with such passion because in his mind, they are his replacements. To keep himself going, he has to play a game of pretend–tearing the photo in half, taking only the page of the letter with her signature and her love and not the page saying who that love was intended for. Harry can draw strength from the memory of Sirius and his parents safe in the knowledge that they loved him. Snape has to tell himself stories.

Also, unlike Harry, who has an army of people who love him, Snape has had exactly one guide through this moral landscape, and that has kept him focused on a very narrow path. If he’d had more guides, he’d be able to see the whole forest, as Harry does; he’d be able to generalize from love for an individual to empathy for all people. But he doesn’t have that, so the doe has to trick him, as it were. He’s been put through the motions of all these “good” decisions only to discover it was all under false pretenses–and now he’s stuck with the choice of owning or disowning those decisions. Does he say “fuck the rest of this defeating Voldemort shit, I only signed on to protect Lily’s kid”? No, he decides to stay on the path he was on, even though what he thought was its purpose–protecting Harry “for Lily"–is gone. And that, right there, is that Dumbledorean moment of truth where he decides just what kind of person he is.

In support of this, consider the incident with the sword of Gryffindor. We find Snape literally in Dumbledore’s place–in the headmaster’s office, sending Harry off on a character-building quest for Gryffindor’s sword while offering mysterious guidance. When he speaks to Dumbledore’s portrait, we hear the difference between this Snape and the one in book six. Before, Snape was a "mutinous” servant constantly angry about being left in the dark; now he treats Dumbledore as a guide while directing his own actions, accepting Dumbledore’s silence on certain topics and trusting him anyway. The Snape we see here is not compelled; he even tells Dumbledore to shut up and let him execute his plan.

Then there is the plan itself. Harry’s pursuit of the doe is my favorite passage in the book, because it’s a moment of genuine, innocent contact between Harry and Snape. It’s a little like the Half-Blood Prince’s potions book, except without the Dark spells and sinister overtones. They’re connecting through what they have in common–their love for Harry’s mother. Of course, because of this, Harry doesn’t realize it’s Snape–the old Snape could never have taken on this role as guide and imparter of wisdom. Think about the huge gap between this episode and the Occlumency lessons. Snape actually has to devise a test for Harry, a course to run. In the bad old days, he’d have wanted to frog-march Harry to the goal because the kid was too stupid and slow to be trusted to do it himself. Now, he has to think about Harry and take his thoughts and feelings into account–he has to empathize with him. And he has to trust him to reach the goal on his own. That would have been unthinkable in book five.

If true empathy, and thus true morality, means seeing our loved ones in the face of a stranger, I think we can assume Snape never quite makes it there. But I think he does do something close, once in the episode with the sword and once right before he dies:

> “Look…at…me…” he whispered.
> 
> The green eyes found the black, but after a second, something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more.

It’s a tiny moment, but vastly important. What has Snape always done that pissed Harry off so much? Looked at him and seen his father. What does he do here? He looks at Harry’s eyes–no, he looks into Harry’s eyes, and asks Harry to look back. We’re told Harry has his mother’s eyes, but for all the violent eye contact during the Occlumency lessons, one gets the sense Snape wasn’t really looking at them; he was too busy seeing James. He’s looking now. For the first time we know of, he is seeing the Lily part of Harry.

So what does it mean for Snape to see “the Lily part of Harry”? Does it mean he’s seeing what is like Lily in Harry and discarding the rest, as he did with the photograph in Sirius’s bedroom? Or does “seeing Lily” mean something less literal? Dumbledore says at some point that Harry looks like James but has Lily’s nature; James is the exterior, Lily is the interior. So when Snape looks at Harry and sees not James but Lily, he could, in a sense, be seeing who Harry really is, as his own person. He loves Lily; he is seeing who Harry is through his love for Lily. And isn’t that co-existing of images, the beloved face behind the stranger’s, the moment of empathy that JKR believes is at the root of all morality?

I’d like to think that’s what happens. We’ll never know. That’s our Snape–ambiguous to the very end. But if we put this scene together with the sword of Gryffindor episode, I think it fits. If Snape still believed Harry was nothing more than a patchwork of James and Lily pieces, I don’t think he’d have been able to help Harry as he does.

One final piece of evidence:

> “Very well. Very well. But never–never tell, Dumbledore! This must be between us! Swear it! I cannot bear…especially Potter’s son…I want your word!”
> 
> “My word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?” Dumbledore sighed, looking down into Snape’s ferocious, anguished face. “If you insist…”

Yet as Snape is dying, revealing the best of himself is exactly what he does. He literally bleeds out all these feelings and secrets that he was once so horrified of Harry seeing. He gives Harry a part of himself–specifically, the part of himself that loved Lily.

Does all of this make Snape unreservedly good by the time of his death? No; he still tears off the half of Lily’s photo with Harry and James in it, and you’ll notice he never manages direct rapport with Harry, just little moments of mediated contact–the Patronus, the pensieve memories, the dying gaze. He’s gone through a huge transformation while remaining, in all probability, an utter prick. But as they say, “As soon as you’ve done all that, you’re ready to begin.” If he’d lived, he might have been on his way to becoming a decent person. Maybe he was only allowed to go so far, like Moses and the Promised Land. That seems like something JKR would do to poor Snape.

Love in Harry Potter isn’t just itself–it represents a person’s entire potential for empathy and thus for morality. Therefore, any redemptive arc for Snape’s character was going to include it. The important thing about Snape during the years depicted by the books isn’t what was motivating him, but what was changing in him as he went, following his silver doe, as it were. Snape’s love for Lily need not reduce the complexity of his character if we figure that all the time he believed he was doing everything for her, a transformation was taking place. If he hadn’t transformed, how could he ever have made the choices he makes in the end?

The great thing about Snape is that he struggles. Harry’s a good person–there’s never any doubt. Snape, on the other hand, is a horrible person who fights and claws his way into goodness. He has everything working against him, but he’s got one thing working for him, and it transforms him. When Harry says Snape is brave, he might just mean that he faced death without flinching–but bravery is hollow unless one is facing danger for a good reason. Snape is brave because he suffers in order to find the right reason. Harry knows his reason from the beginning; his path through the books is to discover his own nature and grow into it. But Snape changes, fundamentally. Painfully. Snape healed crooked and they had to break him and reset him. That’s been my sense of him from the beginning, and that’s what I love about him.

**Author's Note:**

> This meta was originally posted on LiveJournal and Tumblr, but I'm posting it here to make sure it's preserved.


End file.
